I am seeing if there are people in my area who would be willing/want to take on some rescue bettas. There are a couple at my local fish store (eastern Kansas) that have caught my eye but I just don't have the space to keep them long term. I am willing to take them home and nurse them back to health, if there are people willing to adopt them once they're healthy... I've never shipped anything live before and I don't feel very comfortable with it, especially this time of year.

Well I brought one home.. I named him Pumpkin.. his body is black with a greenish shimmer to it and his fins are orange. I don't know what his tail is supposed to look like because he is very clamped and there is a lot of fin rot. He won't eat. His spine is curved and he is emaciated. Tonight I'm just going to warm him up and acclimate him to clean water and hope for the best.. if he makes it, I need to adopt him out.

im not sure if you buying a bunch of sick bettas from the fish store is helping anything in the long run,sure you might help the lives of 5 or 6 bettas but as long as you keep buying them the fish store is just going to keep stocking them.. where as if nobody buys them and a bunch dies and the store is not making much money off them then the store will stop stocking them or at least wont buy so many for sale.

Well in two years I've made 3 rescues. That's not going to effect anything. And neither is buying more. Theyve been buying the same way long as I know, it's a local owned an operated and the main fish guy has his regular shipment and that's just how it goes

Pumpkin passed away in the night :( Thanks for the interest. He was just too far gone when I brought him home to recover. I was hoping a couple days in clean water without ammonia would at least perk him up enough so he could swim for air and eat, but it never happened. I hope someday there are better laws and regulations for keeping fish like there are larger mammals. It's really screwed up the way fish can be treated like this.